8
By the mid-nineteenth century, the systems of control established by the Tokugawa shogunate were under severe strain. A Confucian belief stated that dynasties fell when they faced “troubles within and threats without” (naiyū gaikan). Growing social unrest among the peasantry and the samurai class alike suggested the bakufu’s troubles within; threats from without came from Western imperialist nations, clamoring for Japan to open for trade. The arrival of American gunboats under the command of Commodore Matthew C. Perry in 1853 put an end to centuries of enforced isolation.
Many were angered by the bakufu’s inability to protect Japan from the encroaching barbarians. Some samurai supported overthrowing the bakufu and restoring the emperor to rulership. The result, the Meiji Restoration of 1868, allowed Japan to centralize authority and resources so that it could quickly modernize its political institutions and begin to industrialize its economy. The Meiji Restoration is often described as having a dual nature. On one hand, it signaled a return to imperial sovereignty, an ancient form of rule. On the other, it provided an opportunity to enact revolutionary, progressive changes to Japanese society and culture.
Two slogans characterized the monumental changes to Japanese society, economy, politics, and culture during the Meiji period (1868–1912). The first, “Civilization and Enlightenment” (Bunmei kaika), called for the country to embrace the political and cultural values of Western civilization by promoting science and a spirit of independence and free inquiry and by adopting Western-style political institutions. In the popular mind, “civilization and enlightenment” was associated with the adoption of Western material culture, such as fashions, foods, and architecture. The second slogan, “Rich Country, Strong Army” (Fukoku kyōhei), urged the development of the national economy and military so that Japan could remain an independent nation, unlike the majority of non-European nations that had been colonized. To achieve this goal, Japan would have to build railroads and shipyards, schools and science. The textile industry and the construction of a network of railroads played key roles in generating both wealth and power for the fledgling nation. A third slogan applied to individuals free to pursue their destiny without regard to status restrictions—“Rise in the World!” (Risshin shusse). This call encouraged Japanese youths to educate themselves, persevere, and achieve success and a name for themselves in the new world.
POLITICAL AND SOCIAL DEVELOPMENTS
In terms of “troubles within,” in the mid-1800s the bakufu faced growing discontent not only among oppressed commoners, but also among the ruling samurai class itself. The fundamental cause of the trouble was the commercialization and growth of the economy. In rural areas, diversification of production brought new sources of income to peasants. The expansion of markets for products such as indigo, oils, sesame, cotton, tobacco, textiles, and handicrafts allowed farm families to accumulate profits. Widespread literacy among peasants allowed them to consult farm manuals describing improvements in seeds, fertilizers, and systems of irrigation for better harvests. New rural income, however, flowed primarily to the wealthiest farmers, creating greater economic disparities in the villages, which fomented social unrest.
Peasants were not the only class discontented with the Tokugawa status quo. Many samurai were suffering economically. The majority of low-ranking samurai, who lived on fixed stipends, were unable to meet daily living expenses. Many went into debt to merchants or had to stoop to doing menial work or force their families to produce handicrafts to make ends meet. Although samurai held the highest social and moral position in society, they were poorer than many commoners, which they resented. The desire to hide the incongruence between their social and economic status was captured in the proverb “Even a destitute samurai holds his toothpick high” (Samurai wa kuwanedo takayōji), meaning that a samurai would swagger around with a toothpick in his mouth, as if he’d eaten a sumptuous meal, even if he were actually starving, owing to his pride of status. There was discontent among the daimyo as well, because their official rankings did not always accurately reflect their wealth. A daimyo’s rank was based on the assessment of rice produced by his domain; it determined the size and location of his mansions in Edo, his seat during shogunal audiences, the size of his sankin kōtai retinue, and his ceremonial obligations. For many domains, the official assessment made in the seventeenth century no longer matched the daimyo’s actual wealth. Some had difficulty paying for the trappings of their rank, while others resented being unable to demonstrate their wealth and improve their status.
Beginning in the second half of the eighteenth century, the bakufu also faced new threats from abroad. Russians had increasingly encroached on Japan’s northern borders. Technological progress in weapons and transportation generated a new phase of expansionism among imperialist nations. In 1842, the Japanese watched warily as the British forced China’s Qing empire to accept unequal trade treaties during the Opium War. The acquisition of a Pacific seaboard by the United States brought opportunities for direct trade between California and China, and Japan would serve as a useful supply depot en route. Commodore Perry (1794–1858) embarked on a mission to seek a treaty with Japan, reaching Edo Bay in July 1853 with a small squadron of ships, threatening to return with a larger force if his demands weren’t met. Bakufu officials faced the difficult task of avoiding hostilities while refusing to fully open their country, which would overturn centuries of seclusionist foreign policy. Perry eventually earned an agreement to open two ports, Shimoda and Hakodate, for refueling; to provide better treatment for shipwrecked sailors; and to appoint a U.S. consul. It was a beginning, but far from a full-fledged commercial treaty.
The only European language that officials knew when Perry arrived was Dutch, and the Americans had to rely on shipwrecked Japanese fishermen who had been rescued by American whaling boats as interpreters. Nakahama Manjirō (1827–98), a fisherman from Tosa province, was one such individual, shipwrecked in 1841 and saved by an American whaler, whose captain sent him to school in Massachusetts. Manjirō returned to Japan in 1851 and was employed by the daimyo of Tosa as an advisor. When Perry arrived, Manjirō acted as an interpreter on the Japanese side and later published the first English-language phrasebook. For the first Perry Expedition, there were no Americans who spoke Japanese aboard. Perry brought along a rescued Japanese fisherman, known as “Sam Patch,” who refused to speak to Japanese officials for fear of punishment by the samurai. Stephen Sondheim’s Broadway musical Pacific Overtures (1976, revived 2004) is based on the life of Manjirō.
While the promise of commerce drove U.S. demands, within Japan it did not produce pressures to overthrow the policy of national isolation just for the sake of trade, officially denigrated as the occupation of lowly merchants. In fact, the opposite was true—Perry’s arrival strengthened antiforeign feeling among many samurai and commoners alike. Xenophobia rallied around the slogan “Revere the Emperor, Expel the Barbarian” (Sonnō jōi). This antiforeign movement aimed to preserve national unity and tradition in the face of bakufu impotence. It spread widely among both samurai activists and at the grass roots among the peasantry, primed by the evangelism of Hirata Atsutane. Activists believed that foreigners would colonize Japan and drain the nation of its resources. In conjunction with the teachings of Kokugaku and the Mito school of history, they advocated the view that Japan consisted of a unified national body (kokutai) with the emperor, direct descendant of the Sun Goddess, Amaterasu, at its peak. These ideas influenced the Meiji Restoration in 1868.
Townsend Harris, a New York merchant, was appointed the first U.S. consul general in Japan, arriving in 1856 with instructions to secure a full commercial treaty. The bakufu had been unable to obtain approval for any kind of treaty from the imperial court, so in 1858 the powerful bakufu regent, Ii Naosuke (1815–60), arranged to sign the treaty without imperial sanction; this disrespect toward the emperor intensified agitation against the shogunate. The 1858 Harris Treaty set the pattern for Japan’s commercial agreements with European nations, beginning with the Dutch, Russians, British, and French. The treaties stipulated the exchange of diplomatic consuls; the opening of five Japanese treaty ports; the right of foreign citizens to reside in those ports, trade without interference, and enjoy extraterritoriality, meaning that they were exempt from local laws; the opening of Edo and Osaka for foreign trade; and the setting of import and export tariffs disadvantageous to Japan. In 1860, the Harris Treaty was ratified in Washington, D.C., where a large entourage of Japan’s first ambassadors traveled—the first such official trip abroad after two centuries of relative seclusion. The eighty-one-man embassy to the United States was the first of six missions to the West dispatched before the Meiji Restoration in 1868, sent to negotiate problems connected with the treaties or obtain technical knowledge. These missions opened up perspectives for low-ranking bakufu delegates, who began questioning the wisdom of the traditional social and political order, looking toward the West for new models.
Treaty Port Life
After the treaties were ratified, one of the first orders of business was to set up the treaty ports for the entry of foreigners. After two-and-a-half centuries of isolation, the adjustments required to turn Japanese towns into international trading posts were difficult and painful. Bakufu authorities wished to place the foreigners at a distance from local populations. Before Yokohama was opened to trade, it was a small fishing village lying across the bay from the thriving post town of Kanagawa on the Tōkaidō road. Geographically, Yokohama was a narrow strip of land bounded by water to the east, west, and south and was thus a location that was easy to monitor and control. The U.S., British, French, and Dutch consuls established offices in bustling Kanagawa. To create inducements for the newcomers to settle in Yokohama instead, authorities busily erected Western-style buildings for use as residences, shops, and warehouses. As merchants, shopkeepers, and tradesmen steadily arrived, they were glad to take advantage of the new facilities available at Yokohama.
FIGURE 41. Utagawa Hiroshige III, View of the Seafront in Yokohama, 1870, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
Nagasaki, the center of Japan’s foreign trade for centuries, also became an official treaty port. In 1860, a year after the port was opened, the population of Nagasaki was estimated at sixty-five thousand, with one hundred Europeans and over four hundred Chinese; by 1864, there were as many as seven thousand foreigners in residence. Because the new treaties specified that only nationals whose governments had signed treaties with Japan could land at the new ports, Chinese traders faced a problem in establishing legal residence. They found a canny solution, posing as servants of other foreigners who were legally allowed to enter Japan. Thus protected, some Chinese engaged in clandestine businesses such as gambling and smuggling. Treaty-port officials found it difficult to determine who were genuine servants and who were poseurs.
A key institution for all treaty ports was the Customs House, which not only regulated customs but also served as a place to exchange currency and bullion, an employment office, and a liaison office for all matters where the activities of foreigners intruded on the lives of the native population. Customs officials even undertook the duty of finding mistresses for foreigners—and checking potential candidates for venereal disease.
While diplomatic and treaty negotiations were carried out by statesmen in an orderly manner, they were acted upon by a motley group of foreigners and Japanese who did not necessarily care about the same matters as their governments. To the dismay of local consuls, the first groups of traders to arrive in the new treaty ports were often unsavory or less-than-desirable types seeking profit and adventure. A Catholic bishop in Nagasaki observed that the new arrivals to the city consisted of “disorderly elements of California adventurers, Portuguese desperadoes, runaway sailors, piratical outlaws, and the moral refuse of European nations.”1 When foreign ships were in port, saloons and brothels did a brisk business. Authorities established their own brothel for foreigners, the Gankiro teahouse in Yokohama. Diplomats from the treaty nations were under constant pressure to rescue their nationals from the Japanese police and to account for the bad behavior of drunken sailors and ne’er-do-wells.
Foreigners were restricted from traveling beyond a radius of twenty miles from the treaty port, which made sightseeing difficult if not impossible. Residence beyond this area was permitted only for reasons of health or for those employed by Japanese. Bored European and American troops and traders attempted to entertain themselves by establishing clubs and engaging in horse races. In 1864, English troops imported dogs and established the famous Yokohama Hunt Club, whose moonlight events became a highlight of community life. The hunt was followed by an elaborate dinner party, with music supplied by the regimental band. Foreign hunters shot large numbers of pheasant, wild geese, ducks, wild boar, and deer, offending local sensibilities and Buddhist beliefs, which prohibited such indiscriminate slaughter.
Life within the settlements was dangerous. Antiforeign activists continued their activities through the 1860s, attacking and assassinating foreigners and domestic collaborators. In response, foreign consuls brought in their own guards and troops; at one point, there were over a thousand English and three hundred French troops garrisoned in Yokohama.
Meiji Restoration
Tensions between the shogunate and activists aiming to topple the Tokugawa and restore the emperor to rule continued to grow during the 1860s. Two outer (tozama) domains, Satsuma and Chōshū, excluded from positions of power within the bakufu, emerged as leading anti-bakufu forces. They drew the support of young sonnō jōi activists who engaged in campaigns of domestic terror, even assassinating Townsend Harris’s Dutch secretary, Henry Heuskin. The bakufu enlisted the aid of the French to help build Tokugawa military power to punish dissident domains. In 1866, factions from Satsuma and Chōshū made a secret pact pledging mutual support if the shogunate attacked either domain. Satsuma had developed a substantial arms trade with Britain, which wanted to counter French influence in Japan. Chōshū had created a peasant conscript army in 1865 but lacked access to modern weapons. Sakamoto Ryōma (1836–67), a swashbuckling activist from Tosa, brokered the secret pact. When the bakufu called for a punitive expedition against Chōshū in the summer of 1866, Satsuma refused to supply troops and several other daimyo followed its lead. Chōshū’s armies easily turned aside the bakufu’s undermanned battalions. The following year, the newly installed shogun, Tokugawa Yoshinobu (1837–1913), announced plans to further increase bakufu military power, intent on wiping out dissenting domains. The Satsuma-Chōshū (Sat-Chō) alliance, along with leaders from neighboring domains and supporters within the imperial court, began their own plans to overthrow the bakufu. In late 1867, armed rebels moved toward Kyoto’s Imperial Palace, closely guarded by the Shinsengumi—bakufu forces composed of roguish rōnin swordsmen installed to prevent contact between the court and their imperialist activist supporters.
On January 3, 1868, pro-imperial forces stormed into the palace, where they were welcomed by a group of courtiers. The fifteen-year-old Crown Prince Mutsuhito had been elevated to the throne the previous year as Emperor Meiji, meaning “enlightened rule.” He issued a proclamation that abolished the office of shogun, restored power to the emperor, and created new government offices to be staffed by court nobles, daimyo, and other “men of talent.” The third and final shogunate had officially ended. Nevertheless, for over a year, forces loyal to the Tokugawa and those of Sat-Chō’s imperial faction fought battles in Edo and provinces in northern Honshu and Hokkaido, where the last remnants of Tokugawa support fled. Collectively, these conflicts are known as the Boshin War (1868–69). The total number of casualties, around 3,500, is relatively low in comparison to great revolutionary wars fought in other nations. This fact led earlier historians of Japan to praise the Meiji Restoration as a “bloodless revolution” or “revolution from above.” After Edo was captured by imperial forces, it was renamed Tokyo, or “eastern capital,” and the young emperor was transferred from Kyoto to the former palace of the shogun.
In March 1868, Emperor Meiji summoned nearly four hundred officials to the Imperial Palace, where they were read a statement of the new national policy, known as the Charter Oath, which contained five directives:
FIGURE 42. Uchida Kuichi, Portrait of the Emperor Meiji, 1873. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
The articles of the Charter Oath served as framing principles for the sweeping changes that would take place in governance and society. The first clause made an appeal for national unity by suggesting, disingenuously, that the small clique of Sat-Chō revolutionaries and their allies would not monopolize decision making but would include other influential persons in making policy. The next two clauses expanded on this idea by offering people of all status the opportunity for mobility and participation in national development. The final two articles addressed the concerns of foreign powers, assuring them that Japan intended to become a stable and respected member of the international community, under the tutelage of the “civilized” Western nations.
Meiji leaders launched a revolutionary program of reforms in order to ensure national independence and build the promise of future greatness. Before they could negotiate revisions to the humiliating, unequal treaties that had placed Japan in a semicolonial status, they would first have to foster national unity and build strength and wealth. In just three short decades, Meiji leaders would reorganize the social structure, create a constitutional polity and national assembly, and foster capitalism through rapid industrialization. From early on, they adopted the imperialist outlook of the Western powers, first “colonizing” the Ainus of Hokkaido and the Ryūkyūans of Okinawa, then forcibly opening Korea to trade in 1876 by using their own gunboat diplomacy. The First Sino-Japanese War (1894–95; see chapter 10) allowed Japan to demonstrate the effectiveness of its modernized military, quickly earning a victory that surprised and impressed other nations and gained Japan control over its own colonial territories in Taiwan, the Pescadore Islands, and the Liaodong Peninsula.
“CIVILIZATION AND ENLIGHTENMENT”
Political Reforms
The most pressing matter for leaders was to create a centralized political structure that would permit them to exercise authority throughout the nation. A Grand Council of State, made up of Sat-Chō leaders and their allies, was established to act as the chief policy-making organ. Men like Okubo Toshimichi (1830–78) and Saigō Takamori (1828–77) from Satsuma, Itō Hirobumi (1841–1909) and Yamagata Aritomo (1838–1922) from Chōshū, and Prince Iwakura Tomomi (1825–83) monopolized control of state policy for decades. Although the new state ostensibly returned rule to the emperor, it was this group of men, in fact, who guided the nation while the young emperor served only as its symbolic head. The Grand Council persuaded daimyo to give up their traditional autonomy through generous financial settlements and titles of nobility. In 1871, Emperor Meiji announced that the domains had been eliminated and 302 prefectures established under new imperial governors appointed by the council. The number of prefectures was reduced to seventy-two later that year and finally to the current forty-seven in 1888.
In 1869, the Grand Council eliminated the Tokugawa four-category status system, lifting restrictions on occupational and social mobility. Commoners found changes such as the right to take surnames and to marry and adopt between the former classes liberating, but many ex-samurai were disgruntled. Not only did they lose their monopoly on surnames; they were deprived of their right to carry swords, and, most seriously of all, the state eventually stripped them of their hereditary stipends, forcing the samurai to accept fixed-term interest-bearing bonds instead, which bore just half the annual cost for the national treasury. Another measure that upset many former samurai was the formation of a conscript army. Initially, Meiji leaders envisioned turning ex-samurai into a professional army. The Conscription Law of 1873, however, was based on the practices of Europe’s modern armies, requiring that all males serve for three years after reaching twenty years of age and spend an additional four years in the reserves. Meiji leaders hoped the law would forge ties of loyalty between commoner men and the new state. Nevertheless, large protests soon erupted in rural areas over compulsory military service, known as the “blood tax,” which would deprive farms of necessary labor. Rumors circulated that this term was literal—that blood would be drained from conscripts and used for a variety of purposes, including dyeing blankets and being rubbed on telegraph wires.
Many ex-samurai, bitter about their loss of privileges, also engaged in uprisings during the 1870s. The largest protest was led by Saigō Takamori, a military hero of the Restoration and a member of the Grand Council. Upset by the loss of morale among ex-samurai, Saigō proposed invading Korea as an outlet for their frustrations but was rebuffed by other members of the council. Saigō then resigned from politics and returned home to Kagoshima in Kyushu, where he established private academies for several thousand young ex-samurai to study military tactics and Confucian classics. In 1877, he and forty thousand followers mounted a rebellion against the central government, but this was quashed in a few months’ time by the national army, a mixed force of three hundred thousand conscripts and ex-samurai. The so-called Satsuma Rebellion represented the last hurrah of the samurai class. After 1878, Meiji leaders were free to pursue their agenda without the threat of violent resistance from reactionaries attempting to overturn the new government.
Hollywood borrowed from Saigō’s story in The Last Samurai (2003), but the movie is highly misleading. While the real Saigō was, indeed, fighting to protect the “samurai way,” he was more concerned with their loss of social status and hereditary stipends than with a vague sense of “honor” or preserving traditional ways of life. Saigō’s forces used modern guns and cannons and wore Western-style military uniforms, resorting to swords only after running out of ammunition.
Saigō most likely committed suicide at the end of the battle, and his body was retrieved, but multiple rumors circulated about the popular leader, beloved by many as a paragon of samurai virtue. Some claimed that he went abroad to fight the imperialist powers in India and China, or that he would return with the Russian tsar to overthrow the Meiji regime. One story even claimed that Saigō’s image had appeared in a comet. The Grand Council granted their former colleague a posthumous pardon in 1889, perhaps out of respect, but in effect echoing the pacification of angry spirits such as Sugawara no Michizane in past centuries.
Learning from the West: Hired Foreigners and the Iwakura Mission
Another aspect of Meiji reforms was the rapid westernization of institutions. In 1868, the floodgates to Western knowledge opened wide, and within a decade several hundred Japanese were studying in the United States and Europe. An even greater number of foreigners came to Japan, employed by national and prefectural governments to instruct the Japanese in Western politics, medical practices, legal philosophies, technology, and education.
The “hired foreigners” (oyatoi gaikokujin) who advised Meiji leaders provided specialized knowledge to assist in the modernization of Japanese institutions through technology transfer and counsel. The government hired over three thousand such experts over three decades, and many more were employed privately. The oyatoi were highly compensated; in 1874, the salaries for 520 foreigners consumed over a third of the new nation’s annual budget. They were typically offered nonrenewable three-year contracts and were expected to train Japanese replacements before returning to their home countries. Several, however, became enamored with Japan and decided to settle there. The official system was ended in 1899.
Among the most influential of these oyatoi were Josiah Conder (1852–1920), Basil Hall Chamberlain (1850–1935), Lafcadio Hearn (1850–1904), and Ernest Fenollosa (1853–1908). These men developed expertise in native arts and literature, which greatly influenced both Japanese and Western views of Japanese culture. Conder arrived from Britain in 1877 as the first professor of architecture at Tokyo Imperial University. He trained Japan’s first generation of modern architects and was hired to design and build iconic projects such as the Rokumeikan Pavilion and the Marunouchi area of Tokyo, which was to resemble a London business district. Conder developed a deep interest in Japanese arts, especially ikebana and landscape gardening, writing several popular books that introduced Western audiences to these subjects. He remained in Japan for the remainder of his life. Chamberlain taught at the Imperial Japanese Naval Academy but gained his reputation for his translations of Japanese literature into English, including many haiku and the Kojiki (1882). His most popular work, Things Japanese (1890), was a compendium of miscellaneous Japan-related topics, from samurai to superstitions, pilgrimage to pottery, for the edification of European and American travelers. Hearn, a journalist and professor of English at Tokyo Imperial University, became a naturalized citizen, married a Japanese woman, and adopted the name Koizumi Yakumo. He is best known for his many books on Japanese legends and ghost stories, such as Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (1894) and Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things (1904). The American Fenollosa was hired to teach philosophy at the Imperial University and developed a deep interest in Japanese art and Buddhism. During the early Meiji period, in the heady rush toward westernization, many traditional arts were neglected, insofar as art studies taught by the oyatoi focused on Western forms such as oil paintings. Fenollosa advised Meiji leaders to preserve and protect their traditional arts. With his disciple Okakura Kakuzō (1863–1913), he inventoried national art treasures for the government. He and his wealthy friend William Bigelow amassed large collections of art and ancient Buddhist treasures, which they bequeathed to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Smithsonian’s Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Fenollosa also helped establish both the Tokyo School of Fine Arts and the Tokyo Imperial Museum.
Fenollosa and Okakura were also highly influential in the establishment and promotion of nihonga, or Japanese-style paintings—a new, syncretic style that combined traditional artistic conventions and materials with Western painting techniques, such as perspective, shading, and realism. The style was termed nihonga to distinguish these works from purely Western-style oil paintings known as yōga. Nihonga were painted on washi paper or silk using brushes. They were either monochrome, using ink, or polychrome, using pigments made from natural ingredients such as minerals and semiprecious stones. Nihonga were originally displayed as hanging scrolls or on folding byōbu screens and sliding fusuma doors, but over time, they generally shifted to Western framing styles.
As foreign advisers were helping to shape Japan’s future, the Meiji leaders wanted to see conditions in the world for themselves. In 1871, Prince Iwakura Tomomi led a delegation of forty-nine government officials on an extended trip to the United States and Europe. The Iwakura Mission had three primary objectives: to make goodwill visits to the heads of fifteen countries that had official diplomatic relations with Japan; to inquire about renegotiating the unequal treaties; and to learn the secrets of Western progress by studying institutions, society, and culture. The embassy quickly learned that these countries refused to consider treaty revision until Japan had proved itself a true international citizen by reforming domestic laws and institutions so that they more closely resembled those of their treaty partners. The disappointed ambassadors redoubled their efforts to study the secrets of Western civilization. They divided into subgroups assigned to study different topics: one addressed constitutions and political systems; another handled trade and economics, including industry, banking, taxation, and currency; a third group examined educational systems and philosophies. All visited a wide variety of institutions: prisons and police offices, schools and museums, mints and chambers of commerce, shipyards, textile mills, and sugar refineries. The pace was unrelenting.
The mission convinced its members of the gaping economic and social gap between Japan and the “civilized nations.” Many came to believe that this gap was attributable not only to superior science and technology, but also to the progressive cultural and social values of Western nations. The mission also began to understand the competition between nations in terms of “social Darwinism”—ways of thinking that sought to apply Charles Darwin’s theories of evolution and natural selection to human societies. They came to believe that, in a world in which only the fittest of nations would survive, those that supported modern technology, “civilized” institutions, and Western liberal values were destined to dominate the international environment. Nations that failed to adopt these stances faced colonization or even extinction. Japan would have to be relentless in its efforts to achieve international respect and avoid the fate of weaker nations.
Meiji Constitution
After the Iwakura Mission’s return, Japan’s leaders realized they would not be able to renegotiate the unequal treaties until they had established elected assemblies and a constitution, idealized attributes of Western political culture. As they began planning for these new institutions, their primary goals included clarifying the sovereignty of the emperor and continuing the concentration of power in the hands of the ruling clique, with minimal real power delegated to popular assemblies. According to these principles, the emperor would reign but not rule—just as in past centuries.
As the oligarchs deliberated, ex-samurai, intellectuals, and wealthy villagers began to demand greater political rights. By the end of the 1870s, the Freedom and Popular Rights (Jiyū minken) movement would include more than a thousand organizations, with over a quarter of a million members, who demanded that the new political institutions be broadly inclusive and representative. Groups circulated mass petitions; some even drafted their own constitutions, advocating a more liberal sharing of power than the oligarchs had in mind. Meiji leaders attempted to quell the movement by combining repressive laws with a few strategic concessions. In 1875, they enacted strict laws governing the press and rights of assembly in order to limit the Popular Rights movement’s ability to organize. The Press Ordinance suspended any newspaper deemed threatening to the public order. Police presence was required for all public political assemblies, and discussion was limited to preapproved topics. Furthermore, soldiers, police, teachers, students, and women were forbidden to attend political meetings. To mollify the activists, the leadership agreed in 1878 to establish prefectural and city assemblies; in 1881, they promised to open a national assembly by 1890.
The Meiji constitution was promulgated on February 11, 1889. Early that morning, the emperor, dressed in ancient court garments, informed his ancestors of the new fundamental law of the state in a Shinto ritual before a shrine deep in the imperial compound. He then changed into formal Western attire and appeared on a red-carpeted dais in a lavish European-style reception hall as a benevolent modern sovereign, bestowing a constitution upon the nation. The juxtaposition of such different ceremonies underscores the dual nature of the Meiji Restoration as both a return to ancient forms of rule and a springboard for radical changes to Japanese society and culture.
Nevertheless, during the early Meiji period, the emperor remained a remote, invisible figure to the masses. In order to increase popular support for a constitutional monarchy, Meiji leaders sent the young emperor off to visit every corner of Japan. During the two-and-a-half centuries of Tokugawa rule, emperors had ventured outside of Kyoto just three times; but during the forty-five years of his reign, the Meiji emperor made over a hundred excursions, including six so-called Great Circuits in the 1870s and ’80s. Thus, during the critical first decades of the new nation, its sovereign was absent from the halls of power as he covered thousands of miles, visited every major island, accepted the well-wishes of farmers, and stayed with local notables who installed specially constructed toilets for imperial use only. In order to further foster a sense of emperor-centered nationalism, Meiji leaders invented forms of imperial pageantry modeled on impressive ceremonies conducted for European monarchies on the occasions of weddings, funerals, and commemorations of war victories.
FIGURE 43. Adachi Ginkō, View of the Issuance of the State Constitution in the State Chamber of the New Imperial Palace, 1889. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
MEIJI MATERIAL CULTURE
The Charter Oath had also declared the need to abandon the “evil” customs of the past, and both the state and intellectuals attempted to reform aspects of traditional material culture. In 1872, officials were ordered to adopt Western-style clothes and hairstyles. The solar calendar was adopted, replacing the traditional lunar cycle that had governed the conduct of rituals and the lives of farmers. The government issued fiats at local and national levels to try to eliminate practices that visiting foreigners would consider unseemly, antiquated, or superstitious. Day laborers were prohibited from removing their loincloth (fundoshi) when urinating in the streets, and women were prohibited from appearing bare-breasted in public. In attempting to promote Western medicine, many traditional cures offered by exorcists and shamanistic religious figures were outlawed. The goal here was to prove to the foreign powers that Japan was a civilized nation, so that the unequal treaties might be overturned. But official pronouncements were often met with indifference as the people continued to engage in their normal daily lifestyles.
Among the populace in the cities and areas around treaty ports, however, novel elements of Western material culture became fashionable. Short haircuts and beards become common among men. Suits with trousers and leather shoes replaced kimonos as chic male attire; tailors and shoemakers were among the most prosperous businessmen in Tokyo. Efforts to Westernize one’s personal appearance often resulted in a mixture of native and foreign styles; it was common to see Meiji-era gentlemen in kimonos and bowler hats. Umbrellas, gold watches, and diamond rings became conspicuous signs of one’s enlightened attitude—and wealth. Westernizing one’s appearance was generally limited to men in early Meiji, even within the imperial family; the emperor generally appeared in Western formal or military dress, but the empress typically wore traditional court clothing.
Another example is the change in diet. Bread, cakes, and ice cream spread outward from treaty-port areas to the larger population. Beef and beer were enthusiastically embraced as fashionable items of consumption. Buddhism traditionally proscribed the eating of beef; the limited livestock held by farmers were reserved for pulling plows. Nevertheless, in 1872 Emperor Meiji encouraged Japanese to begin consuming beef and mutton to build strong national physiques. Beef stews and other adaptations of Western cuisine were incorporated into the diet of the Imperial Japanese Army. Beef shops where townspeople could sample the new culinary fashion proliferated; eating beef became emblematic of civilization itself. “Aguranabe” (Sitting around the beef stew pot), an 1871 short story by Kanagaki Robun, satirized townsmen who blithely adapted foreign fashions and trends. The brief tale describes a pompous “man about thirty-five” who uses new imports like eau de cologne, carries a Western-style umbrella, and ostentatiously consults his cheap watch. While dining at one of the new beef restaurants, he strikes up a conversation with a fellow diner, first rapturously praising how “even people like ourselves can now eat beef, thanks to the fact that Japan is steadily becoming a truly civilized country.”3 He goes on to profess the marvels of Western inventions like the telegraph and steam engine, but his misinformed explanations betray his true ignorance.
During the Edo period, the Dutch partook of imported beer; during the early Meiji period, foreigners in treaty ports continued to import the beverage. In 1869, American brewmaster William Copeland established a company in Yokohama that would eventually become the Kirin Brewery Company, one of Japan’s three largest beer producers today. In 1876, the government established Sapporo, another of the three largest breweries, to spur development in Hokkaido; the third, Asahi, was launched in Osaka in 1889. All made a German-style lager that was far too expensive for the average worker but that became fashionable among wealthy urbanites. The opening of affordable beer gardens and German-style beer halls that served tankards of relatively cheap beer began around 1900, expanding markets to less wealthy domestic consumers. By the 1920s, it was common for groups of male workers to socialize at beer halls after work.
Turning to architecture, as new buildings designed by Western architects and their Japanese students proliferated, the physical face of Japan’s cities changed. After the Ginza area of central Tokyo—which had been a neighborhood of humble artisan shops—was consumed by fire in 1872, it was reconstructed as a showplace of westernized civilization, with brick buildings and wide streets illuminated by gaslights. Ginza became the material embodiment of “Civilization and Enlightenment,” with Western-style pharmacies, fancy cafés, and the Seiko watch company (established in 1881). The government hired Josiah Conder to build the Rokumeikan Pavilion, a two-story brick structure in an ornate French style, with grand dining rooms, ballrooms, and even a billiard hall, near Ginza. The Rokumeikan symbolized the state’s determination to appear equal to the “civilized” imperial powers, in order to speed renegotiation of unequal treaties. It provided the main site for elite Japanese men and women, dressed in imported tuxedos and evening gowns, to dance and mingle with their foreign counterparts, partake of French cuisine, drink American cocktails, and smoke British cigarettes. Many Japanese conservatives were appalled by the expense and scandalous behaviors that reportedly occurred there. Some foreign visitors were ungenerous in their appraisals. French naval officer and novelist Pierre Loti dismissed the European-style balls as “monkey shows,” while his countryman Georges Ferdinand Bigot published a cartoon likening the elite Japanese habitués to apes, who unattractively mimicked their betters. Some Japanese writers and cartoonists, repulsed by the exaggerated passions for all things Western, also satirized the wholesale adoption of Western culture.
“RICH COUNTRY, STRONG ARMY”: TRAINS AND TEXTILES
In the early Meiji period, Japan’s economic prospects looked gloomy as Western products flooded the treaty ports. Machine-made cotton cloth from abroad was stronger and cheaper than domestic hand-loomed cotton. Imported wools were valued for their warmth and reasonable price. Traditional lamp oils pressed from seeds could not compete with less costly and more effective imported kerosene. From 1868 to 1881, imports exceeded exports by a large margin. In order to balance its foreign trade accounts, Japan would have to build its economy, manufacture import substitutes, and develop desirable export products.
Transportation
Meiji leaders recognized the need to develop an industrial infrastructure that included a network of railroads, a new postal system, and a rationalized banking system. The railroads were vital to the overall development of industry and were strategically necessary for Japan’s defense. For the nineteenth-century Japanese, just as for their contemporaries in the American West, the steam locomotive was the quintessential symbol of progress and civilization, the epitome of modern industrial power. The railroad had an enormous impact on Japanese society, revolutionizing the overland transport of people and goods and helping engineer a sense of nationhood. The railroad also had a transformative effect on Japanese culture, altering public consciousness of time, space, speed, and leisure travel.
In 1854, Commodore Perry had presented his Japanese hosts with gifts that represented the mechanical wonders of the industrial revolution, including a quarter-sized model railroad complete with a tiny locomotive, cars, and several miles of track. Less than twenty years later, in 1872, Emperor Meiji officially inaugurated Japan’s first daily train services, between Tokyo and Yokohama. In the early Meiji period, reporters were most taken with the advent of speed; trains were spoken of as “putting wings on the people.” In a different kind of comparison, one reporter exclaimed that you could travel from Shimbashi Station in Tokyo to Yokohoma “faster than it takes a hemorrhoid sufferer to empty his bowels.”4 Early passengers were disoriented by the speed of railroads. When one of the first trains to leave Shimbashi Station in Tokyo arrived at Yokohama, passengers reportedly refused to get off because they did not believe they could have reached their destination so quickly.
FIGURE 44. Utagawa Kuniteru, Illustration of a Steam Locomotive Passing Shiodome in Tokyo, 1872. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
In its first year of operation, nearly half a million passengers—mostly bureaucrats, businessmen, and foreigners—rode the Tokyo-Yokohama line, but train fares were initially exorbitant for ordinary Japanese. Larger numbers of people began to take the train as new routes were added, fares reduced, and services improved. From 1890 to 1900, the number of rail passengers leaped from 23 million to 114 million.
By the mid-1890s, the railways were a frequent theme and setting for literary works. Artists inundated the public with colorful woodblock prints of trains—even if trains were not the main subject of a print, they were often depicted in the background. The Tōkaidō line, paralleling the old post-station route from Tokyo to Kobe, accounted for over a third of train riders in the Meiji period. This trip had traditionally taken twelve to fourteen days on foot or by palanquin; the recently introduced steamship made the trip in a few days. But the train could cover the distance in just twenty hours. Passengers saved not only time but fees for hotels and meals along the way. The result of this new economy of time and space was a change in people’s conception of time and distance.
Railroads altered the conception of time because they emphasized timetables and precision, promoting the habit of punctuality and strengthening their riders’ appreciation of the economic value of time. During the Tokugawa era, there had been a relaxed, nonchalant attitude about travel time: river ferries had no fixed timetables, simply waiting until enough customers arrived. Trains, however, operated on schedules and did not wait for passengers. Railway authorities realized the need to stress the importance of punctuality and to inform the public accurately of time. Trains left the terminals conveniently on the hour, but at intermediate stations they came and went at fractions of the hour. This introduced a radically new conception of time, calibrated by the minute. Taking the train required the use of clocks and watches, which barely existed in Japan at the beginning of the Meiji period but soon became ubiquitous.
Railroads also altered popular conceptions of travel and recreation. In the Edo period, leisure travel revolved around pilgrimages to famous shrines and temples. Several private rail companies capitalized on this tradition and were founded with the goal of transporting worshippers to popular pilgrimage sites. The idea of getaway weekend travel emerged by the late 1890s as wealthy Tokyoites took trains to nearby pleasure resorts such as Kamakura, Enoshima, and Hakone. By the 1900s, with special group rates, recreational train travel was within reach of ordinary people, and the railways ran special excursion trains to popular destinations and scenic spots. In 1909, factories with fifty or more employees were offered discounts of 40–60 percent for group travel. Using such discounts, many who otherwise would have little chance to travel went on excursions to shrines, temples, and scenic spots with neighbors, schoolmates, or fellow workers. Thus, while the railroad institutionalized social divisions with different classes of service, they also had a leveling effect by enabling more people to travel and share experiences that factored into the emergence of a national identity.
Another mode of Meiji transport was the jinrikisha (person-powered car, aka rickshaw). Wheeled vehicles had been prohibited within the city of Edo; elites traveled in sedan chairs or palanquins carried by two people. The rickshaw, a light cart mounted on springs and two wheels pulled by one runner, was far smoother and more comfortable. Over forty thousand were in service by 1872, providing employment for many urban laborers. European and American tourists and residents were especially enamored with the rickshaw as a quaint and exotic form of transport. Japanese manufacturers were soon exporting rickshaws to China and colonized Asian territories. Runners averaged five miles per hour and could cover twenty to thirty miles in a day. They were initially much less costly than the train, considerably less than second-class train fare. But as train ridership grew and fares dropped, rickshaw men found it difficult to compete with the faster, more comfortable ride trains offered. By the 1930s, with widespread forms of automated transport, rickshaws had nearly disappeared. After World War II, when gasoline was scarce, they made a temporary comeback but became something of an embarrassment, in Japan and elsewhere, as a symbol of racial and class differences.
Textiles
The silk and cotton textile industries provided the backbone of Japan’s modernization efforts, earning necessary foreign currency to help build military and industrial strength. Machine silk reeling was the first industry to develop extensive factories. Its workforce, heavily female and very young, formed a large proportion of Japan’s labor force during the first decades of industrialization. These women made a double contribution to Japan’s modernization: the profitability of textile factories paid for Meiji modernization and, at the same time, wages they remitted to their families allowed the rural poor to pay rents to landlords, who invested the funds in other industries and in national modernization efforts. Silk production provided work at many different sites beyond the factory. Rural households engaged in sericulture—planting mulberry trees, raising cocoons, and producing homespun thread. Raising silk worms was an important by-employment for many farm families but required strenuous effort to feed the demanding larvae, which consumed thirty thousand times their body weight in mulberry leaves. Some households sold their cocoons to wealthy neighbors who opened small local businesses employing ten or more women to hand-reel silk thread. Others sold their cocoons to silk merchants, who distributed them to rural women for hand-reeling at home.
During the first year of the Meiji period, European silkworms suffered a severe blight, providing an excellent opportunity for Japan to earn much-needed foreign currency by meeting the foreign demand for silk. The Meiji government took the initiative in supporting industrial development, providing direct and indirect financial assistance as well as technical aid, in order to produce a high-quality thread for export markets. Modern silk reeling began with the establishment of government mills in the 1870s, model plants that employed Italian and French silk reelers to teach techniques to Japanese workers. The most ambitious was the large mill built in 1872 at Tomioka, designed to train groups of four hundred women in modern machine-reeled silk production. The government recruited young women from respectable ex-samurai or prosperous farm families to volunteer, offering the chance to train in a new industry. Tomioka recruits were treated generously: they were given new clothes, regular rest periods, and plentiful food. They lived in a spacious dormitory, and the factory facilities included a modern hospital and beautiful gardens. After finishing their training, students often set up factories in their own prefectures, financed by local authorities or private entrepreneurs.
FIGURE 45. Utagawa Yoshitora, Imported Silk Reeling Machine at Tsukiji in Tokyo, 1872. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
Such positive factory conditions, however, deteriorated sharply in the 1880s with the revival of European competition and severe state deflationary policies. Japanese silk quality was still not up to par with Europe; their advantage was in low labor costs, with minimal wages paid to young female workers. State-owned mills like Tomioka were sold to private industry, which reduced rations, benefits, and time off. In order to remain competitive, the private silk mills instituted longer work hours, introducing gas and then electric lighting so that workers could begin at 4:30 A.M. and stay until after sunset, with just a brief break for a noontime meal. Companies built prison-like dormitories surrounded by tall fences, topped with broken glass or barbed wire, to prevent workers from running away. Dorm conditions were cramped and unsanitary: toilet and washing facilities were limited and could be used only at stipulated times; communicable diseases, especially tuberculosis, killed textile workers at much higher rates than among the population at large. The rapid expansion of the industry soon outstripped the pool of available workers. With worsening labor conditions, respectable families no longer sent their daughters to the mills; poor peasant families were subjected to deceptive, high-pressure tactics by recruiters to turn their daughters over to the factories, providing critical funds for many tenant-farmer families facing pressing debts. In 1886, an alliance of silk manufacturers and merchants unilaterally set wages and developed a system of heavy fines for infractions of discipline or poor work quality.
To combat poor morale due to the horrible working conditions, companies made special efforts to raise workers’ spirits through patriotic songs praising the silk workers’ contributions toward building the nation, for example:
Raw silk,
Reel, reel the thread.
Thread is the treasure of the empire!
More than a hundred million yen worth of exports
. . .
Put all your strength into your work.
It’s for yourself
It’s for your family,
It’s for the country of Japan.5
Companies also distributed moralistic textbooks with lessons stressing duty to the nation and self-sacrifice. Such books praised female workers as soldiers of peace, producing textiles that enabled Japan to accumulate money through exports. These textbooks urged absolute obedience to factory rules and supervisors; punctuality; moderation in eating, drinking, and speech; and patience, forbearance, honesty, and frugality. Factory girls were warned that if they failed to work their hardest, “the country of Japan will become poorer and poorer.”6
Despite such high moral tones, few workers showed much enthusiasm for serving the nation or the abusive mills. Some were resigned to their fates; others were defiant. Their own songs, such as the following, made their feelings about their employment conditions clear.
THE PRISON LAMENT
Factory work is prison work
All it lacks are iron chains
More than a caged bird, more than a prison,
Dormitory life is hateful
Like the money in my employment contract
I remain sealed away
If a male worker makes eyes at you
You end up losing your shirt
How I wish the dormitory would be washed away
The factory burn down,
And the gatekeeper die of cholera!7
The cotton industry was more complicated and expensive to modernize than silk, requiring mastery of other technologies. While international demand for silk was stimulated by the blight in Europe, the cotton industry initially fared less well. Domestic cotton was forced to compete with cheap, superior foreign cloth that flooded into Japan under the unfair treaties. By 1878, Meiji leaders decided that foreign cotton posed a threat and resolved to open government mills and to subsidize private ventures. They ordered equipment for ten factories from England, intending to employ poor ex-samurai. By 1886, state efforts had resulted in a modern cotton-spinning industry, although most factories were small. The opening of the Osaka Cotton Spinning Mill in 1882 marked a new age in cotton production. This mill was the creation of Shibusawa Eiichi (1840–1931), one of the Meiji period’s most successful entrepreneurs. The Osaka mill operated 10,500 spindles, five times as many as the next largest company. Rather than hiring ex-samurai and providing housing, the mill hired poor urban commuters from Osaka. To increase profitability, the mill operated twenty-four hours a day and paid lower wages than other mills. Nighttime accidents and fires were regular occurrences. One large fire at the plant in 1892 killed ninety-five workers and seriously maimed twenty-two others.
CHANGING GENDER NORMS
Alarmed by what they saw as excessive individualism in the cities, Meiji leaders sought ways to re-inculcate an ideology of conformity and obedience. Conservative bureaucrats were apprehensive over how the individual was beginning to take the place of the family as the unit of society. These conservatives wanted to reinstate the strong patriarchal authority that had prevailed in samurai households. They issued a Civil Code in 1898 that made the extended household (ie) a legally binding corporate entity.
All decision-making power was vested in the male head of household, who chose the place of residence, managed all household property and business affairs, and had the authority to approve or disallow marriages of his children—up to age twenty-five for daughters and thirty for sons. Women were completely subordinated to the patriarch—their primary obligation was to provide a male heir and household labor. Once wed, women could not testify in courts of law, bring legal action, transact business without their husband’s consent, or initiate divorce except in cases of extreme cruelty. A wife’s adultery, but not her husband’s, was grounds for divorce and criminal prosecution. The model woman was to be a “good wife, wise mother” (ryōsai kenbo) who would dedicate herself to raising educated, modern children and creating a sanctuary for her husband to relax, away from the challenges of his career. This notion essentially targeted middle- and upper-class women, who didn’t have to perform wage-earning labor. Many working-class women were cynical about the new models of Victorian femininity advocated by the state and mainstream society.
The state mandated compulsory elementary education in 1872, extending its duration to six years in 1907. Initially, girls’ education lagged behind that of boys in both quality and attendance levels. The 1889 Girl’s Higher Education Law required each prefecture to establish at least one public, four-year middle school for girls who had completed four years of primary education. These public schools, however, failed to provide the same quality of education found in boys’ schools, focusing more on preparing girls for future roles as “good wives and wise mothers” through teaching morality, etiquette, and home economics. In the 1910s, schools began including tea ceremony and ikebana as part of their curriculum, previously male-dominated arts now considered necessary skills for refined Japanese women.
Some were opposed to this approach to women’s education. One such individual, Tsuda Umeko (1864–1929), had traveled to the United States at the age of six as the youngest member of the Iwakura Mission and remained there for twelve years. By the time she returned to Japan in 1882, she had almost forgotten her native language. Tsuda was vexed by the inferior position of women in Japanese society. In 1885, she began to work in a school for the daughters of nobility but was dissatisfied with its orientation as a mere “finishing school.” She returned to the United States and attended Bryn Mawr College in Philadelphia. After passage of the Girl’s Higher Education Law, Tsuda founded the Women’s Institute for English Studies in Tokyo, which aimed to provide women the opportunity for a liberal arts education, regardless of their status.
Meanwhile, in the eyes of the foreign community, Japan (like other Asian societies) was commonly viewed as a weak, feminine nation, associated with arts and culture, rather than one associated with masculine military and economic strengths. Such views were reflected in Western popular culture. For example, Giacomo Puccini’s nineteenth-century opera Madama Butterfly depicted a Japanese woman victimized and abandoned by her American lover, and Gilbert and Sullivan’s 1885 comic opera The Mikado portrayed the Japanese as backward and uncivilized. Meiji leaders advocated wholesale adoption of Western civilizational norms and material culture to combat such views. Ideas about masculinity began to shift accordingly during the Meiji era. The archetypical samurai—educated, moral, frugal, valuing loyalty and honor over personal gain—embodied the main traditional masculine ideal.
With Meiji mandates for officials to update their appearance and adopt Western values, such as independence and self-advancement, representations of ideal masculinity became bifurcated. Men who adopted the demeanor of fashionable, modern gentlemen—with top hats, frock coats, gold spectacles, and walking sticks—were labeled “high collar” (haikara) for the starched white collars they wore. State officials dressed in this manner and participated in lavish Western-style parties at the Rokumeikan. Itō Hirobumi, one of the most powerful of the Meiji oligarchs, was especially associated with performing this foreign identity, and his administration was derisively dubbed “the dancing cabinet.” Critics who opposed the clique government dominated by Sat-Chō leaders caricatured the oligarchs in their finery as decadent, corrupt, inauthentic, and effeminate. An alternative masculine style, known as bankara (rough and uncouth), arose to contest this image. Bankara men were proudly unfashionable, wearing wooden clogs and frayed kimonos, with sleeves characteristically tucked up to expose muscular arms. They were associated with political activism and fighting for national advancement, in contrast with haikara men pursuing individual financial success. As men increasingly adopted Western dress in the early twentieth century, these contrasts lessened but never fully disappeared. By the end of Meiji, the term haikara had broadened to indicate all that was stylish and novel. Schoolgirls who tied their hair with ribbons and rode bicycles to school were thus deemed haikara.
MEIJI INTELLECTUAL LIFE, LITERATURE, AND RELIGION
While the Meiji leadership was pressing for westernization, other intellectuals echoed their message. Works by Western political theorists such as John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville were translated and circulated widely, encouraging the Japanese to develop an independent and vigorous spirit and stressing the importance of expressing one’s own political opinions. Popular translations included Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, the quintessential tale of the independent, self-reliant man; works by Benjamin Franklin; and Samuel Smiles’s 1845 best seller Self-Help, which urged the enlightenment and education of the working classes so that all could cultivate civility and accomplish great feats. Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days and A Journey to the Moon met the era’s spirit for new vistas and scientific progress.
The most influential propagator of Western knowledge in the 1870s was Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835–1901), whose image appears on Japan’s 10,000-yen note. Fukuzawa was born into a low-ranking samurai family. He studied Dutch and English and served as a translator for the 1860 embassy to ratify the Harris Treaty. Two years later, he traveled with another bakufu mission to England, France, Holland, Portugal, and Russia, where he absorbed all he could of Western civilization. Fukuzawa concluded that Japan was weak and backward because traditional culture did not promote scientific curiosity, self-reliance, and an ethos of individual achievement. To help inculcate these values into his countrymen, he became an educator and writer, establishing a school in 1868 that later became Keio University, founding the influential newspaper Jiji shimpō, and authoring over a hundred books. In his often-reprinted work The Autobiography of Fukuzawa Yukichi, written shortly before his death in 1901, Fukuzawa declared that his life’s ambitions had been fulfilled by the abolition of feudal privileges and institutions and by Japan’s victory in the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95.
In An Outline of a Theory of Civilization (1875), Fukuzawa held that all civilizations must pass through three stages: “primitive,” characterized by temporary communities dependent on nature for food and daily needs; “semi-developed,” with permanent communities in which daily needs are met and there are basic structures of governance, while people remain tied to tradition and are incapable of original production; and “civilized,” in which people pursue knowledge, act independently, and plan for the future. Fukuzawa asserted that Western nations were the most highly civilized, that Asian countries such as China, Japan, and Turkey were semi-developed, and that Africa and Australia were “still primitive lands.” He believed that a nation’s level of development could not be judged by its leadership alone, for “civilization is not a matter of the knowledge or ignorance of individuals but the spirit of entire nations.”8 As illustrated in the following excerpt, Fukuzawa called on all educated persons to advocate adopting Western norms and values, which he found indisputably superior to native achievements:
If we compare the levels of intelligence of Japanese and Westerners, in literature, the arts, commerce, or industry, from the biggest things to the least, in a thousand cases or in one, there is not a single area in which the other side is not superior to us. . . . Only the most ignorant thinks that Japan’s learning, arts, commerce, or industry is on a par with that of the West. Who would compare a man-drawn cart with a steam engine or a Japanese sword with a rifle? . . . While we regard Japan as the sacrosanct islands of the gods, they have raced around the world, discovering new lands and founding new nations.9
The introduction of Western literature inspired young Japanese writers to adopt and adapt Western up-to-date literary conventions and techniques. They faced a significant challenge because their traditional literature was written in a classical style that did not resemble vernacular speech. In addition, many new words adopted from foreign terms had entered the language. Reform movements advocating a standardized writing style (genbun-itchi), launched in the 1880s, slowly infiltrated Japanese writing. In 1900, the Ministry of Education announced reforms aimed at improving writing and reading by standardizing the kana syllabary, limiting the number of Chinese characters (kanji) taught in school, and standardizing the pronunciation of kanji.
In his groundbreaking work The Essence of the Novel (1885), Tsubouchi Shōyō was the first to call for a modern Japanese literature that would discard the “frivolous” writings of late-Edo period and early-Meiji gesaku fiction. He advocated the view that the novel was a serious genre that should strive for realism and focus on expressing human emotion and modern selfhood. Futabatei Shimei’s Floating Clouds (1887) is usually considered Japan’s first successful modern novel. Its protagonist, Utsumi Bunzō, is an unsuccessful intellectual who tries to win the love of his cousin, but she prefers his friend Noboru, an ambitious young man with the tools to succeed in the achievement-oriented Meiji era. The novel plumbs the depths of Bunzō’s mental sufferings and is written in the modern genbun-itchi style.
Two writers who provided meaningful commentary on Meiji modernization are Mori Ōgai (1862–1922) and Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916). Both had studied abroad, Ōgai in Germany, as an Imperial Army officer studying medicine, and Sōseki in Great Britain, as a literary scholar. Their shared experiences abroad and extensive readings of foreign literature influenced their lives and works. Ōgai was a prolific writer of fiction, essays, and biography alike. His 1890 novella The Dancing Girl was written in an autobiographical, confessional style that became popular as the “I-novel” (watakushi shōsetsu). In the story a young man named Ōta, living in Berlin, has an affair with a German girl, but when called to return home to accept a government position he abandons her, leaving her pregnant and suffering from a nervous breakdown. In Ōgai’s serialized novel The Wild Geese (1911–13), a young woman decides to provide for her aging father by becoming the mistress of a sleazy moneylender. As she becomes disillusioned with her luxurious new life, she becomes infatuated with a young medical student, Okada, who passes under her balcony, but Okada leaves Japan to pursue medical studies in Germany.
Sōseki is among Japan’s most revered novelists, as demonstrated by his portrait on Japan’s 1,000-yen note. He was sickly, suffering from ulcers and mental afflictions. After graduate studies in English literature at Tokyo Imperial University, followed by a professorship in English at that prestigious institution, he achieved acclaim with two humorous novels in 1906: I Am a Cat, in which a cat who speaks in a posh, upper-class manner comments on the foolishness of his middle-class “master” and his friends; and Botchan, about a rowdy Tokyo boy who becomes a teacher in Shikoku. One of Sōseki’s best-known works is Kokoro (1914), a novel composed of two distinct parts. In the first half, a young male student narrates how he has developed a relationship with a reserved older man he calls Sensei—a term of respect used for teachers and elders—whom he met at the seashore. Back in Tokyo, he visits Sensei and his wife Shizu and tries unsuccessfully to learn why his older friend is so deeply unhappy. Called back to the countryside to attend to his dying father, the young man receives a lengthy letter from Sensei. The second half of the novel consists of the letter itself, a suicide note. In it, Sensei explains that when he was a young man he and his best friend K had both fallen in love with Shizu. When Sensei obtained permission to marry the girl from her mother, K felt betrayed and committed suicide. Sensei had been tormented by guilt ever since, but Shizu never learned the reason for K’s death and thus could not understand her husband’s melancholy. He explains why he has decided to confide in his young friend, but implores him to never reveal the truth to Shizu:
You asked me to spread out my past like a picture scroll before your eyes. Then for the first time I respected you. I was moved by your decision to grasp something that was alive within my soul. You wished to cut open my heart and see the blood flow. I was then still alive. I did not want to die. That is why I refused you and postponed the granting of your wish to another day. Now I myself am about to cut open my own heart and drench your face with my blood. And I shall be satisfied if, when my heart stops beating, a new life lodges in your breast.10
Sensei explains that he has been moved to commit suicide by the actions of Russo-Japanese War hero General Nogi Maresuke, who committed junshi (ritual suicide following the death of one’s lord) on the night of Emperor Meiji’s funeral in 1912. Nogi’s suicide touched off emotional debates in Meiji society about traditional codes of honor and samurai virtue in the modern age. After the funeral procession left the palace, Nogi committed seppuku (ritual disembowelment) and his wife took her own life in the manner prescribed for a dutiful samurai wife—by severing her jugular vein (jigai). Social commentators debated the meaning of the deaths. Some condemned the act as a barbaric remnant of outmoded feudal codes. Others claimed that it reflected Nogi’s disgust with the decline in moral values. The suicide note itself claimed that it was an act of atonement for the many deaths he felt responsible for during his military career. Nogi became a symbol of loyalty and self-sacrifice invoked by many social commentators over the following years.
MEIJI RELIGION
The Meiji Restoration brought a radical change in Japan’s religious climate. Under the Tokugawa regime, Buddhist sects had served as a semiofficial branch of the government, enforcing anti-Christian laws. Most large religious complexes contained both Buddhist and Shinto elements. The early Meiji government, however, aimed to use the emperor as a sacred foundation for the new state and elevated Shinto into an official state religion, adopting a strongly anti-Buddhist attitude. The critics of Buddhism charged that it was an imported, foreign religion that was superstitious and irrational and, furthermore, not engaged in social and charitable activity like the Christianity of the Western imperialist nations. In critics’ eyes, Buddhism could no longer be associated with Shinto, which would officially represent the “pure” Japanese spirit that now faced the challenge of modernization. State officials adopted policies to forcibly separate Buddhism from Shinto, resulting in the large-scale destruction of Buddhist temples, images, and texts throughout Japan during the first decade of Meiji. Between 1868 and 1874, over a thousand Buddhist temples disappeared. Shinto shrines that previously identified native kami with Buddhist deities were purged of all traces of Buddhist imagery and ritual.
Temple lands were seized and Buddhist monks were forced to become Shinto priests or to laicize. In 1872, the Meiji government changed the laws regarding Buddhist priests, decriminalizing meat eating, marrying, growing out their hair, wearing ordinary clothing, and other practices that were previously punishable for clergy. The pivotal changes in religious policy created Japanese Buddhism as we know it today, anomalous in the world for the fact that almost all male Buddhist priests are married and pass management of their temples to their sons. Despite their brief persecution, Buddhist sects remained wealthy and popular and soon began to regain their power and standing.
One faction of Buddhists, led by educator Inoue Enryō (1858–1919), attempted to align Buddhism with Western thinking concerning social evolution, to present Japanese Buddhism as progressive and rational. They differentiated Japanese Buddhism from the Theravadan traditions prevalent in Southeast Asia and Sri Lanka. European Orientalist scholars of Theravadan schools had professed that Buddhism was atheistic and idolatrous, and that the passivity it fostered was responsible for Asia’s relative lack of development. Japanese Buddhists fought this characterization by asserting that their form of Buddhism was an ethical faith in tune with Enlightenment ideals, in contrast to Christianity, which relied on myths. Leaders of this “new Buddhism” made their case at the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893, attempting to convince Judeo-Christian religious leaders of the “civilized” nature of Japanese religion, which could provide answers for Christians struggling to reconcile their faith with science.
After the Meiji Restoration, Shinto was reconceived as a means to bind the nation together under the emperor, with a mix of devotion to kami, ancestor-worship, and group loyalty to family and nation. The emperor, as divine descendant of the Sun Goddess, was not only head of state but also the high priest of Shinto, responsible for conducting rituals to ensure the well-being of the nation. Shinto priests were ordered to undergo standardized training, but many disagreed with the official pantheon, which prioritized Amaterasu over the kami Ōkuninushi of Izumo, seen by many as equal or superior to the Sun Goddess. Since this view posed a threat to the legitimacy of the Meiji state, officials decided to create a separation between Shinto rites, performed by the state agents and considered part of civic responsibility for all Japanese, and Shinto doctrine, which was a matter of individual religious belief.
In order to propagate correct understanding of Shinto as the foundation of the nation and fight against the possibility of widespread Christian conversions, officials initiated a campaign known as the Great Promulgation Movement from 1869 to 1885. Officials in charge of the campaign were disciples of Hirata Atsutane. They appointed a cadre of National Evangelists that included both Shinto and Buddhist priests, who were trained at institutes in Tokyo and in each prefecture to lecture local people on the new national creed, which combined elements from Shinto mythology and Confucian morality with indoctrination in the need for patriotism and gratitude to the emperor. To educate commoners about “civilization and enlightenment,” lectures also included topics like taxation, the military, and foreign relations. The evangelists were prohibited from “preaching” or engaging in “religious” activity such as presiding over funerals or faith healing. As one might surmise, the movement was unpopular among people who had heretofore gathered at local shrines for communal celebrations, rather than dull sermons, but it lingered until 1885, after which elementary schools took on the task of Shinto education.
Article 28 of the Meiji constitution, which granted the Japanese freedom of religious belief “within limits not prejudicial to peace and order and not antagonistic to their duties as subjects,” was carefully worded to protect the primacy of the new, state-oriented Shinto while guaranteeing religious choice—an important matter for other imperialist nations that firmly desired the ability to proselytize Christianity in Japan.11 Under the constitution, performance of Shinto rites and Shinto education were deemed part of national ethics, required of all subjects, and not “religion” as such.
Shintoist groups that maintained religious teachings and practices and could not easily fit into the new national conception of Shinto as civic duty were placed into a separate category—Sect Shinto. There were thirteen officially approved Shinto sects that varied widely in belief and practice: some were based on mountain-worship; others focused on purification, ascetic practices, or faith healing; and some combined Confucian and Shinto teachings. Approved sects also included monotheistic new religions, such as Kurozumikyō, Konkokyō, and Tenrikyō, which were formed in the nineteenth century in rural areas. Some of these new religions rejected the legitimacy and authority of the Meiji state, denounced the growing cult of the emperor, and envisioned an egalitarian sociocultural order. The charismatic founders of these salvationistic groups often gained their reputations as faith healers or by claiming that they were divinely possessed.
Nakayama Miki (1798–1887), the female founder of Tenrikyō, became famous for her abilities to cure smallpox and ease the pain of childbirth. As the vessel and mouthpiece of God the Parent (Oyagamisama), she wrote prophecies, developed spiritual practices involving music and dance, and encouraged charity, while she herself led a life of poverty. Tenrikyō often opposed or violated state laws, and Miki was imprisoned on multiple occasions. As the group grew to massive proportions, it was condemned as irrational and heterodox by the mainstream media. After Miki’s death, her son reformed her teachings to conform with state policy and gained approval of Tenrikyō as the thirteenth and final sect of Shinto. Thereafter, any popular new groups advocating Shinto beliefs or practices would be considered heterodox and subject to suppression by the state.
One such heterodox group was Oomoto, founded in 1892 by Deguchi Nao (1836–1918), an uneducated peasant woman. Nao expressed her dissatisfaction with the changes in Meiji society by describing her earthly paradise as a place where people would grow their own food and rely on natural products for all necessities such as clothing and housing. There would be no money. No one would eat meat. There would be no silk, tobacco, or Western-style clothes, no fancy sweets or cakes, and no gambling. There would be no need for education, because everything would be clear and easily understood by all. Laws and policemen would be unnecessary because all would be honest, sincere, and pure in spirit. This utopian vision overtly rejected the westernized, urban-centered capitalist model promoted by the Meiji state. The group reached national proportions in the 1920s under the leadership of Nao’s charismatic son-in-law, Deguchi Onisaburō (1871–1948), a gifted spiritualist who created rituals and practices modeled on “Ancient Shinto.”
Another religious development during Meiji was the growth of Protestantism among the Japanese, many of whom considered it a factor in the success of Western nations. Protestant missionaries became active in the treaty ports in the late 1850s. Numerous members of the ex-samurai class who had been aligned with the Tokugawa and were thus alienated from Meiji leaders believed that Christianity might provide a path to help them revitalize their status and build a future for the nation. Some became educators, opening private colleges. Prominent Christians included Niijima Jō, also known as Joseph Hardy Neesima (1843–90), who studied in the United States and later established Doshisha University in Kyoto. Niijima believed that Christianity, westernization, and civilization were an inseparable trinity needed for national progress. Nitobe Inazō (1862–1933) became a convert under the influence of William S. Clark, an oyatoi and lay missionary appointed to establish Sapporo Agricultural College. While studying in the United States, Nitobe adopted the Quaker faith and married an American Quaker woman. Returning to Japan, he served in top government and teaching positions and cofounded Tokyo Woman’s Christian University. He is perhaps best known for his work Bushido: The Soul of Japan (1899), written in English in an attempt to explain Japan’s traditional ethos to Western audiences, identifying “the Way of the Warrior” as the source for national values including honor, loyalty, sincerity, and self-control.
Finally, Uchimura Kanzō (1861–1930), another Clark convert, gained notoriety when, as a teacher, he refused to bow before a copy of the Imperial Rescript on Education in 1891 and was forced to resign on account of this gesture of disrepect. He later became disillusioned with the racism he perceived among Western Christians and founded the Nonchurch (Mukyōkai) movement, an indigenous sect that eschewed professional clergy and sacraments, in search of an authentic Christian life. In his well-known essay “Two J’s” (1925), Uchimura declared:
I love two J’s and no third; one is Jesus, and the other Japan.
I do not know which I love more, Jesus or Japan.
I am hated by my countrymen for Jesus’ sake as a yaso [Jesus, hence Christian] and I am disliked by foreign missionaries for Japan’s sake as national and narrow. . . .
I know that one strengthens the other; Jesus strengthens and purifies my love for Japan; and Japan clarifies and objectivises [sic] my love for Jesus. Were it not for the two, I would become a mere dreamer, a fanatic, an amorphous universal man.12
Despite such noteworthy individuals, Christianity was never able to obtain a large Japanese following, claiming less than 1 percent of the population during the Meiji period and ever after.
In summary, two centuries of economic growth threatened the highly ordered society envisioned by the shogunate. In 1853, when the United States demanded that Japan open to trade and accept highly disadvantageous trade treaties with imperialist nations, faith in the bakufu was further undermined, eventually leading to the restoration of imperial governance. A small group of oligarchs monopolized power in the new Meiji government and enacted sweeping reforms to the society and economy that would allow Japan to meet the threat of further encroachment and the challenges of building a modern, industrialized society. Many of their initiatives, from the hiring of oyatoi to the establishment of a constitution and elected assembly, were designed to prove that Japan was a “civilized” nation according to Western norms. In urban areas, many embraced aspects of Western material culture such as foods, fashions, and architectural styles; intellectuals and writers urged their countrymen to adopt Western values as well. Meiji leaders, however, wished to foster a strongly patriarchal society of patriotic citizens and enacted laws and measures to limit individual rights, especially those of women.
Early state modernization efforts were driven by a sense of threat and inferiority, undergirded by nineteenth-century social theories about racial and civilizational hierarchies. In the decades that followed, economic development and education helped reduce the perceived gap between Japan and the imperialist powers. By the 1920s, Tokyo and Japan’s other major cities were fully modern metropolises, equal in stature to those of other industrialized nations and facing the same global trends, such as the expansion of mass consumerism and mass media and the emergence of political philosophies, such as socialism and communism, that threatened the authorities.
FURTHER READING
Cwiertka, Katarzyna J. Modern Japanese Cuisine: Food, Power, and National Identity. London: Reaktion Books, 2006.
Fujitani, Takashi. Splendid Monarchy: Power and Pageantry in Modern Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.
Gluck, Carol. Japan’s Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987.
Howell, David L. Geographies of Identity in Nineteenth-Century Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.
Jansen, Marius B. The Emergence of Meiji Japan. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Karlin, Jason. Gender and Nation in Meiji Japan: Modernity, Loss and the Doing of History. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2014.
Keene, Donald. Emperor of Japan: Meiji and His World, 1852–1912. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.
Ketelaar, James E. Of Heretics and Martyrs in Meiji Japan: Buddhism and Its Persecution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993.
Miller, Ian J. The Nature of the Beasts: Empire and Exhibition at the Tokyo Imperial Zoo. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013.
Phipps, Catherine L. Empires on the Waterfront: Japan’s Ports and Power, 1858–1899. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015.
Stalker, Nancy K. Prophet Motive: Deguchi Onisaburō, Oomoto, and the Rise of New Religions in Imperial Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007.
RECOMMENDED FILMS
Nomugi Pass. 1979. Feature film directed by Yamamoto Satsuo. Historical drama of the travails faced by young females employed in the silk-spinning industry in the early 1900s.
Rurouni Kenshin. 2012. Feature film directed by Ōtomo Keishi. Tale of a former assasin who wanders the country in the Meiji period offering aid to others, based on a popular manga and anime series.
Taboo. 1999. Feature film directed by Ōshima Nagisa. Highlights homosexual relationships among the Shinsengumi at the end of the Tokugawa era.
The Rickshaw Man. 1958. Feature film directed by Inagaki Hiroshi. Tale of a poor rickshaw driver who becomes a surrogate father to a middle-class boy at the turn of the twentieth century.
The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum. 1939. Feature film directed by Mizoguchi Kenji. Melodramatic story of a family of kabuki actors in Tokyo and Osaka circa 1885.